Duke University Press Embodying the Sacred: Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima

In seventeenth-century Lima, pious Catholic women gained profound theological understanding and enacted expressions of spiritual devotion by engaging with a wide range of sacred texts and objects, as well as with one another, their families, and ecclesiastical authorities. In Embodying the Sacred, Nancy E. van Deusen considers how women created and navigated a spiritual existence within the colonial city's complex social milieu. Through close readings of diverse primary sources, van Deusen shows that these women recognized the divine—or were objectified as conduits of holiness—in innovative and powerful ways: dressing a religious statue, performing charitable acts, sharing interiorized spiritual visions, constructing autobiographical texts, or offering their hair or fingernails to disciples as living relics. In these manifestations of piety, each of these women transcended the limited outlets available to them for expressing and enacting their faith in colonial Lima, and each transformed early modern Catholicism in meaningful ways. Review "Important reading for those interested in women’s expressions of devotion in colonial Lima and modes of theorizing spiritual practices more generally. . . . Particularly valuable for giving voice (and body) to female figures and their devotional models." Author: Gabrielle Greenlee Source: H-LatAm Review “No one makes colonial Spanish American spirituality as material—in all senses of the word— as does Nancy E. van Deusen. The book reanimates Lima's religiously devoted female inhabitants from spiritual autobiographies, fragmentary petitions, and beatification records: women who transmitted a gendered, colonial Catholic theology. The result is a critical intervention in the history of gender and religion, and a master class on how to read things in the past.” Author: Bianca Premo, author of Source: The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire From the Author Nancy E. van Deusen is Professor of History at Queen’s University; author of Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, also published by Duke University Press, and Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima; and editor of  The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús. About the Author Nancy E. van Deusen is Professor of History at Queen’s University; author of Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, also published by Duke University Press, and Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima; and editor of  The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús.